Go ahead and reply to that email right now
Worried that replying too quickly to a prospective employer could make you seem desperate? New research suggests you may be worrying about the wrong thing
IN THE 1996 flick Swingers, Jon Favreau’s character Mike asks Vince Vaughan’s character Trent how long he should wait to call a woman he just met. “I used to wait two days to call anybody, but now it’s like, everyone in town waits two days. So I think three days is kind of money,” Trent advises. “Laugh all you want, but if you call too soon you might scare off a nice baby who’s ready to party.”
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You know what Trent would be today? Unemployed. At least he likely would be if he applied this make-‘em-wait mentality to replying to a potential employer. According to new research from Vanderbilt University professor Eric VanEpps, replying quickly is increasingly an asset in today’s job application market.
“Though managers might believe that response speed is not a top factor, it consistently affects their judgments and preferences”
“Even delays of just five to 10 minutes dramatically reduce providers’ likelihood of being hired,” the researchers concluded, based on a large survey of data from a popular jobs platform. “In our experimental studies, providers who take less (versus more) time to reply are seen as more likely to be responsive in the future, make more positive impressions than slower responders, and in turn, are more likely to be hired.”
The researchers wrote that replying quickly even trumped out the quality of their work or the content of the message sent, which the researchers identified as “a distinct signal that employees can control to increase their hireability: replying to messages quickly. Empirically, every minute counts.”
“Speed is a signal,” said co-author Einav Hart, from George Mason University. “People see a quick response as a sign that you’ll be attentive to their needs in the future, not just right now.” The commonly held idea that a fast reply signals that you’ve got nothing going on, and are thus desperate, appears not to be true; instead, fast replies seem to signal that you’re giving that potential employer priority.
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The researchers also found this is not something that is necessarily consciously understood by employers themselves, though. In one study, the researchers asked the participants to rate their expectation of reply speed, and found that very few (one in 10) expected replies within the hour. “While managers often claim that speed is not as important as other factors…our research shows that they do, in fact, appear to give it an oversized weight in their judgment,” the authors wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “Though managers might believe that response speed is not a top factor, it consistently affects their judgments and preferences.”
If you’re rushing off to set up an autoreply, however, don’t do that. While the speed rule seems to apply, the authors warn that automatically replying wipes out any benefit you might accrue. “Participants did not like receiving automated messages,” they wrote, “because the response speed of an algorithm no longer signals anything.” 
Kieran Delamont